Midwinter Preparations

Midwinter is a big holiday for all winter overs across Antarctica. Every station will be celebrating the day when the sun starts to come back up. (The sun is currently 23.5 degrees below the horizon and next week it will begin it's slow progress back to the southern hemisphere.) All inhabited Antarctic stations will send each other greeting cards and some stations will get calls from celebrities or important folks. At south pole we will be having a fancy dinner on Saturday night and will be getting a two day weekend. This week have been a frenzy of getting things ready for our midwinter dinner on Saturday. Here is the menu for the midwinter dinner.

We are having a "spirit week" leading up to Saturday. This is what I did for crazy hat/hair day:

I'm also wearing my new flip flops that I finished earlier this week. They are made from yellow foam we had laying around that people usually cut up and put in their carharts for knee pads and cargo straps from the strap bin the craft room that I sewed on by hand.

The sunflower has bloomed just in time for midwinter! I will be transplanting it into a bucket so we can bring it up to the galley as a center piece for the dinner.

The 'booze barn' where all the soda/beer/wine/booze/other store supplies is stored lost heat over the weekend and most of the cans of soda/beer froze and exploded (see example of almost exploded can above). Lots of the wine bottles blew their corks out. The booze barn was a mess of frozen exploded drinks.

Those trash cans near the wall heaters are full of cans we are thawing out, salvaging the unbroken cans, and draining and recycling the broken cans. People are starting to call it 'The Great Booze Barn Freeze of 2015".

And since I can't have a post without stars/aurora/milky way here is a friend of mine taking advantage of a perfectly shaped drift for star gazing out of the wind in front of ARO.